Israel must not fall into Iran's trap

Banner displaying Iran's missile capabilities in Teheran street  credit: Reuters/Majid Asgaripour
Banner displaying Iran's missile capabilities in Teheran street credit: Reuters/Majid Asgaripour

The response to the missile attack by Iran should be one that serves Israel's real strategic interests.

Iran launched 181 ballistic missiles at Israel last night. Such an attack cannot pass with impunity. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Israel has to fall into the hole that Iran has dug for it, one that is just the same as the strategy that Hezbollah’s late general secretary Hassan Nasrallah tried to implement for eleven months of a multi-front war, while Hamas was also still functioning.

Now, Hamas’s military arm is defeated, IDF forces are on the ground in South Lebanon, Hezbollah’s military leadership has been wiped out, and the Shi’ite terrorist organization is at a historical low. This is exactly the reason why Iran carried out its attack. It’s no coincidence that they turned the attack into a sort of package deal of one response to the elimination of three people: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Iranian general Abbas Nilforoushan, and Hassan Nasrallah. Iran doesn’t care about Haniyeh the Sunni, and so didn’t respond to his killing in Teheran until Hezbollah was in dire straits.

More broadly, the Iranian regime is trying to drag Israel into a full-blown multi-front conflict that includes Iran, all in an attempt to enable Hezbollah to survive. Israel must therefore gauge its response carefully. The message of "attacking throughout the Middle East" is fine for morale, but what is needed is a strategy, not tit-for-tat. And no, revenge is not a strategy. Revenge is revenge, and that’s it.

Iran understands very well that the Democratic administration in the US is not keen on a fight, with the presidential election round the corner on November 5. So it at this stage it is trying to provoke Israel into responding alone, without direct US involvement. Israel doesn’t need the US for a message that "Israel has the right to defend itself." The right to defend civilians against attack by an enemy country is anchored in Chapter VII Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Israel’s interest, unlike that of the Iranians, lies first and foremost in intense diplomatic activity vis-à-vis the US administration, and in making clear that the time has arrived to implement the declaration of President Joe Biden that Iran must not possess a nuclear threat. Everyone with any sense in the West understands the consequences of such a state having nuclear weapons. It’s enough to look at Iran’s friend North Korea to bring that message home. The best possible outcome is therefore a combined US-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.

Another possibility that would hurt the Iranian regime badly and could have a more significant impact on Iranian society would be to hit the country’s oil infrastructure. While Iran’s GDP grew by 4.7% last year, according to International Monetary Fund data, the oil component grew by 19%. In other words, destroying Iran’s oil infrastructure would wreck its economy, no less. It would, however, also send the price of oil shooting up, another development that the Democrats in Washington would not be happy to see.

If the US will not join in a kinetic military operation, that does not mean that Israel should not respond. It will have to respond intelligently. According to foreign reports, in 2010 the uranium enrichment installation at Natanz was hit by the Stuxnet computer worm. In an operation attributed to US-Israeli collaboration, control systems produced by Siemens were damaged. A decade later, a cyberattack on the strategic port of Bandar Abbas, which caused chaos, was also attributed to the two countries. Besides that, of course, according to foreign reports Israel attacked Hezbollah by detonating pagers and walkie-talkies.

These attacks demonstrate that it’s possible to hurt the Iranians without a showcase attack, which at present would not serve Israel’s interests anyway. A response is required, but one that is in line with the aims of the war: bringing the hostages back, and returning the residents of Israel’s northern and southern border areas to their homes safely. If that’s what we want to achieve, a massive, showy response is not the way.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 2, 2024.

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.

Banner displaying Iran's missile capabilities in Teheran street  credit: Reuters/Majid Asgaripour
Banner displaying Iran's missile capabilities in Teheran street credit: Reuters/Majid Asgaripour
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